disconnect

And so 97 days of relentless political pummeling begins:

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush ended his vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., and wasted no time in contrasting his platform to that of the Democrats, telling a campaign rally in Missouri: "They're going to raise your taxes, and we're not."

Nothing subtle about that. Aside from the fact that Kerry specifically said he wouldn't raise middle-class taxes last night, he might have a point. I suppose you could say that the budget deficits could get so out of control, or the war in Iraq could get so bad that Kerry may have no choice but to raise taxes, but those are problems that will be in place already when he takes office, problems largely created by Bush. I do take Bush at his words that he won't raise taxes; I think he would sooner loan California to the Chinese Central Bank than raise them or even allow his current tax cuts to expire (remember when you look at deficit projections that his tax cuts are "temporary"). That's not necessarily a good thing. Though it is nice to see that he's taken some time out of his vacation to run the country.

Last night, Kerry said, "Now I know that there are those who criticize me for seeing complexities, and I do, because some issues just aren't all that simple." In response this afternoon, Bush replied, "There is nothing complicated about supporting our troops in combat!", once again showing his stunning ability to see nuance in a situation. It happens that Kerry attempted to pay for the $87 billion Iraq expenditure (the "supporting our troops" that he's referring to) by ending some Bush tax cuts to pay for it, under the wacky assumption that you have to have money to spend money. When that failed, he voted against the measure as put forward by the Republicans as sort of a "shove it" vote in protest of both the way the war was handled and the way (or lack of a way) that it was being paid for. He has stated that if his vote would have been decisive (it was not nearly decisive) he would have voted for the spending bill to make sure the troops had what they needed. Things can get kind of complicated when you look at the whole picture and not just the slice of it that Condi and Karl Rove tell you.

In fairness to Bush though, he's not the only one making outrageous attacks. In the section of his speech where Kerry talked about being able to see the complexities of a situation, he said, "And proclaiming mission accomplished certainly doesn't make it so." Clearly though, some missions were accomplished by May 1, 2003, justifying the President's claim on the aircraft carrier that day. We controlled Iraq's oil fields and palaces, for example. If gaining access to large amounts of "Texas Tea" was your mission, we accomplished it. If the mission was to let millions of Iraqis live lives free of fear and with a vote in who leads them, the mission was not quite accomplished yet. It just depends on what your definition of "mission" is. George W. Bush understands that nuance.

Some people have suggested recently that John Kerry's speech tonight will be overshadowed by some of the other speakers this week. Personally, I thought John Edwards's speech last night, while good, wasn't as great as some of the other speeches earlier this week. That's not necessarily a bad thing. For John Kerry in particular, Democrats didn't nominate him because he gave the best speeches in the primaries, they nominated him because he was the most serious candidate in a time of war, he was the most qualified candidate, and he had given the most service to our country to contrast against Bush's "service" to the country.

It's not a bad thing that the Democratic Party has veteran leaders like Bill Clinton who can speak eloquently to not only Democrats, but moderates and Republicans as well. It's not a bad thing that the Democratic Party has young leaders like Barack Obama that gives us confidence for the future. And it's not a bad thing that the Democratic Party has people like Al Sharpton, who says things other people might be embarrassed to say but still speaks the truth. For those like David Brooks who complain that Kerry is boring, as you're falling asleep during his speech tonight ask yourself how many times Bush has inspired you during his speeches. Ask yourself what you thought of him during those live press conferences, where he fumbled half the questions that were given to him in advance and completely fell on his face on the rest of the questions given with no advance warning.

I wanted to link to Sharpton's speech (full text at CNN.com - no registration required) because he offered a direct reply to Bush's appearance at the Urban League in Detroit last week, an appearance scheduled after Bush took heat for being the first president since the 30's not to meet with the NAACP. I'll post an excerpt from it below:

Mr. President, as I close, Mr. President, I heard you say Friday that you had questions for voters, particularly African- American voters. And you asked the question: Did the Democratic Party take us for granted? Well, I have raised questions. But let me answer your question.

You said the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule.

That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the 40 acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres.

We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us.

Mr. President, you said would we have more leverage if both parties got our votes, but we didn't come this far playing political games. It was those that earned our vote that got our vote. We got the Civil Rights Act under a Democrat. We got the Voting Rights Act under a Democrat. We got the right to organize under Democrats.

Mr. President, the reason we are fighting so hard, the reason we took Florida so seriously, is our right to vote wasn't gained because of our age. Our vote was soaked in the blood of martyrs, soaked in the blood of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner, soaked in the blood of four little girls in Birmingham. This vote is sacred to us.

This vote can't be bargained away.

This vote can't be given away.

Mr. President, in all due respect, Mr. President, read my lips: Our vote is not for sale.

In case anyone didn't get to see Barack Obama's speech last night, here's a link to video of it from C-SPAN. Unbelievable stuff. Everyone was hyping him and his speech before last night although he hasn't even been elected to the Senate yet, and he blew them all away. Poor Ron Reagan Jr. had to go up there afterwards and give a science lesson on stem cell research when even Clinton couldn't have followed that speech.

The full text of the speech is also on the NY Times here. Here is a short excerpt from it, though it doesn't do justice to the entire thing and the way it brought the house down.

If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription drugs, and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.

It is that fundamental belief, it is that fundamental belief, I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family.

E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.

The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States.

I thought I would have more to say about the first night of the Democratic National Convention, but I don't really. I was going to pick some of the best quotes from the speeches and put them on here, but this article at the NY Times already does a pretty good job of that. Surprise surprise, I liked Al Gore's, Jimmy Carter's and Bill Clinton's speeches. I liked Clinton's the best, but they were all good. Gore may have the charisma of a block of wood, but when you read the text of his speeches they always make so much sense. And for being an 80-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner, Jimmy Carter took some shots at Bush. Clinton made a couple of fairly sweeping generalities about Republicans (e.g.: they favor the concentration of wealth and power in a few hands) that can be debated, but mostly he laid out specific points where the Democrats have better plans very well.

This page has links to the full text of the speeches given by Gore, Carter, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as some video too though I haven't checked that out, given that I watched them live. If you didn't get to watch them, I highly recommend reading them. As I've told Robyn several times (and she's told me), every time I hear a speech like that it's refreshing to know that I'm not insane, and these things that I believe make sense. Watching the first Democratic primary debate was like a shock to the system, hearing people criticize Bush and push policies that actually made sense, knowing that there are lots of people out there who share my ideas and the feeling that Bush has gotten things terribly wrong. That's not as much of an aberration now that the campaign has progressed, but back in the fall and winter of last year, it was something new.

There's a good article at the NY Times this morning about the 9/11 Commission's attempt to correct the record on 9/11 details which have been in question for some time. It details the number of ways in which the hijackers were in the country illegally, the fact that NORAD had been comtemplating an attack using planes as missiles, and hopefully a final debunking of Cheney's claims of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, including the belief that the Prague meeting between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent never occurred. But I wanted to offer my opinion on this one part:

In the first hours after the Sept. 11 attacks and ever since, the White House has consistently insisted that President Bush and his deputies had no credible evidence before the attacks to suggest that Al Qaeda was about to strike on American soil.

But the assertion has been questioned as a result of the commission's digging. After its most heated showdown with the Bush administration over access to classified information, the commission pressured the White House to declassify and make public a special intelligence briefing that had been presented to the president at his Texas ranch on Aug. 6, 2001, a month before the attacks.

The existence of the document - but not its detailed contents - had been known about since 2002, when the White House confirmed news reports that President Bush had received an intelligence report before Sept. 11 warning of the possibility that Al Qaeda might hijack American passenger planes.

In testimony this April to the Sept. 11 commission, before it was made public, Ms. Rice insisted that the report was "historical."

"It did not, in fact, warn of attacks inside the United States," she testified. "It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information."

But there were gasps in the audience in the hearing room when she disclosed the name of the two-page briefing paper: "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in U.S."

People used to gang up on Clinton for hiding behind technicalities and mincing definitions of words, like the famous "it depends on what the definition of 'is' is", or "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," because he didn't consider oral sex to be sex. I think we can safely add Condi Rice's, "It did not, in fact, warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information." to that list. I guess the only justification for her words that would keep them from being outright lies is that when she says it didn't "warn of attacks inside the United States", she left out the word "specific" before "attacks". In other words, clearly it warned of the general threat for attacks inside the U.S., but it didn't mention, for example, the flight numbers Al Qaeda would use, therefore it didn't "warn of attacks", it simply warned of the threat of imminent attacks, and warning about the threat of attacks is different than warning about specific attacks. If you're having trouble comprehending the distinction, I don't blame you. Also, when she said it was "historical information based on old reporting", that makes sense if you accept that the government (and Bush) already knew of bin Laden's desire to attack the homeland... except the administration's contention after the attack was that we had no idea this could happen. But if the intention to attack inside the U.S. was well known already, then the PDB with the title "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in U.S." could be safely termed "historical". Of course, if this was old news, you would think we might have been taking action on some of the "old news" contained in the PDB, such as securing airlines against the potential of hijackings, which was mentioned in the memo.

So in summary, the memo didn't warn of attacks, it warned of the threat of attacks, which is different, duh. And the "historical information" quote is OK only if all this was old news to us, in which case our capable leadership would surely have been preparing our defenses, right? And mincing the distinction between oral sex and "sexual relations" is something you have to appear before a grand jury to clarify and ruins your political career, but Condi Rice's verbal gymnastics around the truth in the wake of the biggest terrorist attack in our history keep the country more secure and deserve your vote for four more years.